Images from Eight Decades: the 1960s

The 1960s saw a continuation of the Nobel laureate tradition at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab under the direction of Edwin McMillan. Luis Alvarez, one of the Lab’s greatest scientists, invented among many other things a unique type of linear accelerator which he used to discover resonance states in elementary particles. For this work, he won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics. Donald Glaser won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber, and Melvin Calvin won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for identifying the chemical path of carbon during photosynthesis. Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg worked with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and helped forge a nuclear test ban treaty.